“Well, I feel better,” he said, sounding more cheerful than he had since she’d met him. “How about you?”

Clean but outcast; she couldn’t say that was an improvement. “Yes,” she replied anyway. “Are you hungry? Did you want to shop?”

“I thought maybe we could stock up on snacks so we wouldn’t have to keep going back to the stalls,” he said. “And then—maybe a book or two? If we still have a whole day of travel left.”

“Or more,” she said. “But I’m not sure you’ll be able to find anything to read.”

He pointed. “There’s a newsstand over there. Surely they have magazines even if they don’t carry books—”

She was giving him an ironic smile; she could feel it on her face. “Ah. I didn’t know you’d troubled to learn goldtongue while you were in the shower.”

“No, I—” he began before he realized her point. He looked both angry and embarrassed. “I see. Nothing here in a language I can understand. Of course. Well, then, let’s just go look for food.”

There were maybe twenty-five different food stalls set up in one section of the station, in addition to two restaurants where passengers could go in, be seated and order a full meal. Nearly half the vendors sold fish in some form or another—raw, dried, fried, baked, laid between slices of bread—whereas there weren’t many varieties of meat available. Of course, fish was not a common commodity in the land-locked city, and only a few of the in-country towns boasted river trout big enough to bother catching. Kit wondered if this sheltered blueskin boy would be brave enough to try food so foreign, but in fact he seemed drawn to the fishmongers’ wares.

“So you like fish?” she asked him as he seemed to be considering the merits of fried and baked varieties.

“Yes. I’ve had it a few times at the city restaurants, and Pakt’s wife served it twice. I found it very tasty.”

“Do you know exactly what kind you ate?”

So she guided him through a few selections, recommending dried strips for travel, and then they headed to the fruit-sellers’ stalls. It was a strange buying experience, Kit found, because naturally none of the vendors would sell to her directly, but she had to do all the translating for both parties. Nolan never made any pretense of speaking to anyone except her, but the vendors all stubbornly addressed themselves to the blueskin, despite the fact that he obviously didn’t understand a word they were saying.